What’s more, new initiatives worth, collectively, more than $100 million were being announced in conjunction with the roundtable that will supposedly help keep kids in school, help bridge the achievement gap, etc., among them:

*America’s Promise Alliance Grad Nation Community Impact Fund will raise $50 million to support the goal of ending the dropout crisis and prepare young people for college and careers, the release said.

* Microsoft Education is putting $15 million into research and development for immersive learning technologies, including game-based instruction and the creation of a lifelong learning digital archive, the release said.

The president would have been better off talking to these people about job creation than education reform, not only because they aren’t the right people to be talking to about improving classroom dynamics, but also because employing the unemployed with kids has been shown to improve educational outcomes.

It would certainly do more to help education than any of the high-stakes test-based reform policies that we have seen in the past decade, stretching over the administrations of president George W. Bush and Obama.